Tag Archives: data science

Open Data Analytics

At Findwise we regularly have companywide hackathons with different themes. The latest theme was insights in open data, which I personally find very interesting.

Our group chose to fetch data from the Arbetsförmedlingen (Swedish Employment Agency), where ten years of job ads are available. There are about 4 million job ads in total during this time-period, so there is some material to analyze.

To make it easier to enable ad hoc analysis, we started off by extracting competences and personal traits mentioned in the job ads. This would allow us to spot trends in competences over time, in different regions or correlate competences and trait. Lots of possibilities.

Personal qualities and IT competences

As an IT-ninja I find it more exciting to focus on jobs, competences and traits within the IT industry. A lot is happening, and it is easy for me to relate to this area, of course. A report from Almega suggests that there is a huge demand of competences within IT for the coming years and it brings up a lot of examples of lacking technical skills. What is rarely addressed is what personality types are connected to these specific competences. We’re able to answer this interesting question from our data:

What personal traits are common complementary to the competences that are in demand?

The most wanted personal traits are in general “Social, driven, passionate, communicative”. All these results should of course be taken with a grain of salt, since a few staffing/general IT consulting companies are a big part of the number of job ads within IT. But we can also look at a single competence and answer the question:

What traits are more common with this competence than in general? (Making the question a bit more specific.)

Some examples of competences in demand are system architecture, support and JavaScript. The most outstanding traits for system architecture are sharp, quality orientated and experienced. It can always be discussed if experienced is a trait (although our model thoughts so) but it makes sense in any case since system architecture tend to be more common among senior roles. For support we find traits such as service orientated, happy and nice, which is not unexpected, Lastly, for job-ads needing javascript-competence, personal traits such as quality orientated, quality aware and creative are the most predominant.

Differences between Stockholm and Gothenburg

Or let’s have a look at geographical differences between Sweden’s two largest cities when it comes to personal qualities in IT-job ads. In Gothenburg there is a stronger correlation to the traits spontaneous, flexible and curious while Stockholm correlates with traits such as sharp, pragmatic and delivery-focused.

What is best suitable for your personality?

You could also look at it the other way around and start with the personal traits to see which jobs/competences are meant for you. If you are analytical then jobs as controller or accountant could be jobs for you. If you are an optimist, then job coach or guidance counselors seems to be a good fit. We created a small application where you can type in competences or personal traits and get suggested jobs in this way. Try it out here!

Lear more about Open Data Analytics

In addition, we’re hosting a breakfast seminar December 12th where we’ll use the open data from Arbetsförmedlingen to show a process of how to make more data driven decisions. More information and registration (the seminar will be held in Swedish)